"Interstices: A Small Drama of Words" (1984)/Intercourse (1987)

(Originally discussed on 4/21/20)

I hope everyone has some concept of what day it is (it's Thursday, I think). Next week, I would like for us to read a short story I recently published titled "Lay Your Head On My Pillow" in Murder Journal. It can be found online here: https://www.themurderjournal.com/current-issue/individual-articles. Murder Journal was founded by a collective of graduate students in the Women's Studies program at the University of Alabama. All of the pieces in this first issue combine to tell an incredibly compelling narrative about race, identity, gender, sexuality, and performance. I encourage everyone to take a look at the other articles. We will meet again on Tuesday April 21 at 7pm EST on Zoom. Link to Zoom room: https://duke.zoom.us/j/399446444

In addition to my short story, I'm also including two optional readings which provide some feminist theoretical context for the ideas I'm working through in my story: "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words" by Hortense Spillers and the 1995 "Preface" and the chapter "Occupation/Collaboration" from Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse (1987). Spillers first presented "Interstices" in 1982 at the Barnard Conference on Sexuality. Feminists including Carole Vance, Ellen Dubois, Gayle Rubin, and Ellen Willis organized the event at Barnard College in order to confront the taboos surrounding complex discussions of sexuality within late-20th century feminist discourses. The Barnard Conference has become infamous within the history of feminist discourse because of the roles that its participants and protesters played in the "Sex Wars" of the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

Though the wars devolved into many smaller skirmishes over time, the primary sites of debate for feminists at the Barnard Conference were the public accessibility of pornography, the concept of sex-positivity, the sexual practice of BDSM (also called "S/M" or sadomasochism), and prostitution. The staging of these topics as scenes of conflict to be resolved rather than impossible questions which must collectively be explored meant that feminists were pressed to stand either "for" or "against" porn, sex-positivity, BDSM, and prostitution. This either/or model literally left little space at the conference for feminists who wished to express their conflicted feelings about the intermingling of sexual trauma and pleasure, as well Black feminists who observed how events such as slavery, colonialism, and racist media representation required the development of an entirely different grammar of desire and intimacy to capture their experiences of sexuality.  The dominant narrative of feminism which emerged from the Barnard conference was one which endorsed the idea of sex positivity in all contexts; sexual liberation was to be conflated with sex positivity. I would be very interested in re-staging these debates with all of you: is sexual intercourse the primary path to a woman's sexual liberation? Does pornography encourage men to sexually degrade and abuse women? If so, should it be outlawed? Can participants find genuine pleasure in BDSM and sexual role-play, or is it simply an exaggerated reproduction of quotidian patriarchal power dynamics? Should prostitution be legal? Is prostitution empowering for women? How do we confront the simultaneous existence of prostitution and sex trafficking in a patriarchal society?

I think that Dworkin and Spillers' essays offer passionate, terrifying, and searingly vulnerable glimpses into the interstitial lines of flight or gray areas within the Sex Wars that contemporary feminist discourse largely represses. Dworkin actually did not even attend the Barnard Conference as a speaker; instead, she picketed the event with her organization WAP, or Women Against Pornography. Within feminist and public discourse, Dworkin's oeuvre is often reduced to the mis-quoted line, "all sex is rape," which is meant to paraphrase her statement in Intercourse that "violation is a synonym for intercourse." In the Intercourse excerpts I've selected, Dworkin is confronting the way that patriarchy defines intercourse simultaneously as "the normal use of a woman" and "a violative abuse," which results in a "synthesized reality." So how would women even begin to identify for themselves what pleasure in sex is when their entire subjectivity has been crafted around the idea that sexual abuse is not only pleasurable, but also the only way through which women may come into Being? For Dworkin, patriarchy makes it such that if a woman were to find genuine pleasure for herself during sex, she would immediately become "abnormal" and therefore no longer within the normative category of "woman" (one could say here that the only way for a woman to find pleasure is to become a freak...).

Spillers is also grappling with the structural assumptions that undergird the category of "woman" in "Interstices," though she localizes her critique to the discursive, historical, and representational conventions that make it profoundly difficult for Black women to articulate their unique sexual and intimate desires. She describes Black women as the "beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb." This image of Black women in stasis, trapped within the interstices of race and gender, raises the stakes of Dworkin's argument in Intercourse even higher. If the subject position "Black woman" emerged within the social, sexual, and linguistic grammar of slavery-- an institution in which the systemic sexual violation of enslaved Black women could not even be acknowledged as rape because slaves were legally considered commodities/property--how could those individuals still identified as "Black women" post-slavery even begin to make a distinction between the unspeakable-yet-mundane horror of rape and the possibility of agency and pleasure in intercourse, much less in the ever-elusive orgasm? To be cheeky and grim, one could argue that for Black women, all sex was and still is rape, in the sense that the ways that society fetishizes, exploits, and reduces Black women through the archetypes "Mammy," "Jezebel," and "Sapphire" (Angry Black Woman) persist today. The archetype is separate from her name, which she does not know because she has never been given the opportunity to seek it out and share it with others. What if Black women stopped vacillating between those three archetypes for the sake of others? Would we still be able to be interpellated as our new selves? Would the ability to name ourselves lead to an entirely different cosmology of sexual desire and liberation? What is pleasure under a new name?

I've attached digital copies of Intercourse and Spillers' essay anthology Black, White, and In Color. "Interstices" is Chapter Six and begins on page 152. For those who are interested in learning more about the Barnard Conference, I've also attached a digital copy of Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (1984), which is an anthology that Carole Vance put together from the conference papers. Spillers' essay is also in there. I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts.